We would like to thank the following companies for supplying and supporting us with our test system hardware and equipment: Intel, ASUS, MSI, Western Digital and Corsair.

On the testbed side of things we have to cover the introduction of our new Corsair Force GT 240GB drives. These are SATA III drives and over the coming weeks our machines will be transitioning into the use of these drives. That means for the moment we may see some boards tested with our older Kingston 128GB SATA II drives and others with our new Corsair 240GB SATA III drives.

When it comes to testing, it's going to ultimately impact three tests only. PCMark 7, HD Tune Pro and AIDA64 HDD Read testing. For that reason you'll see in the graphs what type of hard drive was used, albeit SATA II or SATA III. Of course, we'll also make mention of it again in our comments. It's a big enough deal, though, that it of course had to be mentioned and it's going to have an impact on performance in HDD specific tests.

So with that out the way, let's get into the overclocking side of things. Getting into the BIOS and fiddling around with everything, we ended up with a 59x multiplier and a slight bump in our BCLK to 101.5.

As you can see above, this resulted in our 2600k coming in at 5076MHz or 5.08GHz as shown in our graphs today. This is a nice overclock and the main thing we like to see from boards is that we're able to go past that 5GHz mark. It should yield some strong performance and we'll see just how it went against some of our other Z68 based boards here - the ASUS Maximus IV Extreme-Z and GIGABYTE G1.Sniper2.